Are there still Conservatives in America?

Are there any more conservatives out there? Isn’t it ironic that our current generation of rightwingers claim heritage from Barry Goldwater? He was after all the man that declaimed in his address to the 1964 Republican National Convention

"Extremism in the Defense of Liberty Is No Vice."

Not since Bryant’s “Cross of Gold” speech to the Democratic convention for the 1896 election has there been a more seminal political statement. But now we see that for those scions of the Goldwater revolution, Senator Goldwater’s beliefs were just words. Like any other platitude it might be pulled from its drawer, buffed up a bit and shown off to guests but it no longer has quotidian use.

We see this no better than in the gyrations that the Bush willing executioners are spinning in to defend his extra-legal use of eavesdropping in defiance of FISA and the Constitution. Whether it is to claim as Richard Posner has that these are merely filling in the gaps in the law or like Senator Cornyn who said, "None of your civil liberties matter much after you're dead" the wingers seem deliberately intent on giving the late Senator Goldwater the spins not only in his grave but in his very afterlife.

So where are they? Where are the conservatives? Where are those ladies and gentlemen of the right that see George Bush for what he is – the spoiled megalomaniacal son of wealth. Where are those conservatives that believe that the Constitution and nation for which it stands is more important than the bragging rights that come with having your party’s guy in the White House?

Anybody out there?